Justice-as-Truth Legal Argument

by W'Lawpsh / April 26th, 2012

Justice as fairness is intended as a political conception of justice. While a political conception of justice is, of course, a moral conception, it is a moral conception worked out for a specific kind of subject, namely, for political,
social, and economic institutions.

— John Rawls (1921-2002)

PART 1. Pictorial Argument

There were many massacres of Indian peoples before the advent of photography. There is also a famous set of photographs regarding the event of December 29, 1890, known to Indians as the Massacre at Wounded Knee and to the United States government as the Battle of Wounded Knee. Some of these in conjunction with the moccasin telegraph taught a lesson not to be forgotten to the still-surviving illiterate tribes if North America: the end of times was upon them and the unity with which they identify. Some of the photographs are reproduced below. Please try to see them as they would have been seen and still are perceived by the Indian peoples, perhaps even before considering the text that accompanies them at Wikipedia, Wounded Knee Massacre.

Soldiers pose with three of the four Hotchkiss Guns used against the Lakota at Wounded Knee. Photo by Grabill, Deadwood, South Dakota. The cannon are Hotchkiss Mountain Guns of 1.65 in. They are sometimes referred to as Mountain Rifles.

Burial of the dead after the massacre of Wounded Knee. U.S. Soldiers putting Indians in common grave; some corpses are frozen in different positions.

Spotted Elk a.k.a. Heȟáka Glešká [Lakota] or Hoh-pong-ge-le-skah [Cheyenne] who later became known as ‘Big Foot’ or ‘Si Tȟaŋka’ in a 1872 portrait taken while part of a Dakota delegation visiting Washington D.C. US National Archives and Records Administration Photo Citation # 111-SC-87772.

Miniconjou chief Bigfoot lies dead in the snow after massacre at Wounded Knee.

The medicine man Yellow Bird on the killing field. The rifle appears rather more like a soldier’s than an Indian gun from its superficial condition and the manner of its resting position: that is, this may be a post mortem composition for propaganda purposes.

The scene three weeks afterwards, with several bodies partially wrapped in blankets in the foreground.

(1). The Declaration of Independence settled that one People has no right to possess another’s homeland or to dictate how the other shall govern itself, and the Constitution of the United States of America gave certain Peoples direct access to the Supreme Court of the United States to enforce that STRUCTURALLY-CRITICAL fundamental principle.

(2). Specifically, the Commerce Clause enacts Congress can regulate trade with “foreign Nations and Indian Tribes”, those being the two explicitly-identified categories of other sovereign Peoples organized as States for constitutional law purposes. The Defence Clause stipulates that their lands can not be invaded unless they invade the United States first. The Treaty Clause adopts the long established convention of public international law that ambassadors or other public ministers of sovereign states may, however, contract for rights of consensual entry into each other’s territory.

(3). The Supreme Court of the United States confirmed the continuity of the previously established international and constitutional law “doctrine of discovery.” It holds that indigenous Tribes are sovereign “States” for the purpose of the legal remedy of direct access to the Supreme Court, the same as foreign Nation type States; although, being “indigenous”, they are not “foreign”. Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia (1831).1

(4). As a matter of procedural law the direct application to the Supreme Court to declare void a breach by the United States of the principle of non-interference with the possession and government of the sovereign territories of other Peoples, i.e., foreign Nations and indigenous Tribes, can only be made in the name of an ambassador or other public minister.

(5). After both had retired and renewed their old friendship the second president of the United States John Adams in a letter to the third, Thomas Jefferson, said: “Your [aristocrats] are the most difficult Animals to manage, of anything in the whole Theory and practice of Government. They will not suffer themselves to be governed. They not only exert all their own Subtilty Industry and courage, but they employ the Commonalty, to knock to pieces every Plan and Model that the most honest Architects in Legislation can invent to keep them within bounds.”

(6). The crucial fact of world history, indeed the fact upon which the continuity of life of earth let alone the freedom of Peoples depends, is that subsequent to 1871 the Supreme Court of the United States chose to side with the “aristocrats” and against the principle, from all appears by instructing each generation’s Clerk of the Court not to file applications submitted by Indian Tribes pursuant to the constitution’s original jurisdiction clause. We say “from all that appears” only because it seems inconceivable that an administrator such as the Clerk, whose jurisdiction under Rule 1 of the Supreme Court Rules is limited to matters of form not jurisdictional and jurisprudential substance, would usurp the power to amend the constitution by willful blindness without at least talking it over with the head administrative judge, i.e., the Chief Justice of the United States, and that he, in turn, would discus it with his colleagues on the bench. No legal or political issue is or can ever be of greater moment and weight.

(7). In consequence of that fact, it has come about that the “aristocrats,” i.e., the super-rich or best-born, purchase or influence the enactment of the Federal Imperial Statutes that frustrate the anti-imperial legislative intent of the Constitution of the United States; the intent to create a society of laws serving, as the Preamble proclaimed, “Justice” “Tranquility” “defence” “Welfare” and “Liberty”.

(8). On behalf of imperialism and against constitutionalism the Supreme Court obstructs and ignores the constitution’s legislative intent by putting “Liberty” at the head of the list of values, taking it to signify an ungovernable license to the rich to plunder foreign Nations and Indian tribes and tyrannize “We the People” with indefinite detention, based on nothing more than the suspicion of the President in his capacity as the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, which arbitrary power is the definitive hallmark of all empires, and therefore refutes everything that the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution were proclaimed and waged to preclude.

(9). In the result the five constitutional values have been corrupted to serve “absolute despotism” (i.e., the type of government rejected by the Declaration of Independence) over everyone and everything on earth, based upon Injustice instead of Justice, Turmoil instead of Tranquility, Aggression instead of Defence, Exploitation instead of Welfare, and Domination instead of Liberty.

(10). Adams’ and Jefferson’s great plan as recorded by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—to end the lawlessness and cruelty of the previously established era of empires—was frustrated in all respects; specifically, by the US Supreme Court’s treasonable willful blindness to constitutional questions that challenge any of the three manifestly unconstitutional Federal Imperial Statutes: first, the Appropriations Act of 1871 against the Indian Tribes; secondly the War Powers Act of 1973 against any foreign Nations who may object to the absolute despotism of empire; and thirdly the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011 against “We the People” of the United States.

(11). The only pacific solution is the reestablishment of the rule of law by means of a Marbury v. Madison judicial review, by the US Supreme Court, of the non-compliance of the Federal Imperial Statutes with the Constitution’s Amendment, Commerce, Defence, Original Jurisdiction and Treaty Clauses and the Bill of Rights. This can be achieved only by overcoming the treasonable obstruction and ignoring by the Clerk of the Case of the Mahican and Mi’kmaq Tribal Ambassadors.

(12). These times not only try men’s souls but the soul of the United States of America and of each of the constitutional democracies she leads. Two hundred twenty three years ago the United States was brought into existence to end the inherent and self evident evil of imperialism. To fulfill the country’s mission specifically in the terms laid out by its Constitution and the most fundamental of the original interpretive precedents Marbury v. Madison (1803) and Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia (1831), one absolutely must not start all over with a fresh revolution as if the ancestors’ blood sacrifice was in vain.

(13). Instead, we must adopt the forty years of painstaking legal research and preparation of the presently-obstructed classic constitutional case against imperialism of the Mahican and Mi’kmaq Tribes, and now carry it forward, into so very many courts that the judicial stone wall unjustly and unfairly blocking the critical question of the Federal Imperial Statutes’ breach of the Constitution’s anti-imperialism is undermined and collapses, without more bloodshed.

(14). Only that is capable of achieving salvation in time and in peace by means of constitutional triumph; as opposed to the triumph of violence leading inexorably to the global suicide guaranteed by continuing the imperial cycle in the nuclear age.